Short version at the top, because you are busy and this is not complicated. The app you know as Happening is now called Frae. Your account is the same account. Your events are the same events. Every link you have ever shared still works. We changed the name and almost nothing else.
If that is all you needed, thank you, carry on. If you want to know why, read on.
Why change a name at all
"Happening" was a lovely word and a terrible name. Two problems, both fatal in the long run.
First, it is generic. "Is anything happening this weekend?" "There is a lot happening right now." The word was doing so much work in ordinary English that it never really belonged to us. A name should point at one thing. Ours pointed at everything.
Second, and this is the one that actually forced the decision, it is impossible to search for. Try telling a friend to search the App Store for "Happening". You get a wall of apps with the word in their description and ours somewhere on page three. Try ranking for it on Google. Try buying a clean domain for it. We were competing with the entire English language for our own name, and the English language was winning.
Why Frae
We wanted something short, ownable, and easy to say out loud. "Frae" is a Scots word meaning "from". We liked it for reasons that are one part sentimental and one part ruthlessly practical.
The sentimental part: the whole app is about getting people together, and "frae" is the word for where people come from. Friends coming frae all over to land on one date in one place. The practical part: it is four letters, nobody in our corner of the world is using it, and when you search for it, you find us. That last bit sounds trivial. It is the entire reason we could not keep the old name.
What changes for you
Nothing but the paint. To be specific:
- Your account. Unchanged. Same login, same password, same friends list. You do not need to sign in again.
- Your events. Unchanged. Every event you have created or been invited to is exactly where you left it, with everyone's availability intact.
- Your links. Unchanged in practice. Old invite links that point at the old domain still work; they forward to the new one automatically, and whoever taps them lands in the right place.
- The icon and name on your phone. This is the one thing you will actually see. Next time the app updates, the icon and the label under it become Frae. Same app, new sticker.
We deliberately did not touch anything underneath. Same servers, same database, same everything. A rename is the kind of change where the best possible outcome is that you barely notice, and that was the whole goal.
The new home
We live at frae.app now. If you had the old site bookmarked, that bookmark will carry you here. If you follow this blog, hello, it moved with everything else and kept its full history, including the posts written back when we were Happening.
Thank you
Changing a name once people know it is a small act of faith that they will follow you across. If you were with us as Happening, thank you for coming frae there to here. Same app, same job: get six friends to agree on a date without a 73-message group chat. It just has a name you can actually search for now.
If anything looks broken, support@frae.app is a real inbox I read myself.